Never Alone - Leaders' Talks

You're listening to this week's edition of the road.

So I've never spent 30 days in the wilderness by myself.

As a young man, I'd go out and camp, and sometimes I'd camp by myself and I'd have alone time, and it was refreshing.

But I never stayed to the point where things got weird.

I never stayed to the point of extreme loneliness and homesickness.

But when we move away from his plan long enough, God's design and plan for us, things do indeed get weird.

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We hope you are encouraged by today's message.

Today's message could be titled A Couple Different Things.

I'm choosing the theme Never Alone, but I did consider his precious presence, the constancy of his presence, not new concepts.

If you've been in church for a year at least or more, you've probably heard some of these topics and what we're going to be unpacking today.

But here, what I want to consider today is that as we look to the new year, as we look to 2020, like we all do, we start thinking about the things of what did I do in 2019?

What were wins?

What were losses for me personally?

We start kind of taking inventory, and we kind of, some of us, start looking at the calendar for 2020, and we start thinking about the things that we want to change.

What can 2020 look like?

How can it look different?

And so the New Year's resolutions.

And we've heard this unpacked many times about you know good intentions, gym memberships, and the staggering stats about gym memberships going up and uh at the first of the year, and then by uh March, oftentimes they're canceling the membership, and you know, we're kind of regressing in some of those things.

And so we're met with some discouragement, we're met with resistance, and we're met with kind of a sense of maybe a sense of failure, like, oh man, here we go again.

And before we know it, the next year starts looking way too familiar and starts looking a lot like the year before us.

But I want to challenge us in a different way, and I want to say that if you've already gotten yourself a gym membership and you put it in the stocking for your spouse or for yourself, and you guys have those hopes, I applaud you because I think that's absolutely part of the overall well-rounded Christian that we want to be, right?

We want to be healthy emotionally, we want to be healthy spiritually, we want to be healthy physically.

So eating right, thinking right, doing things in alignment that way.

So there's a lot of equ there's a lot of pieces to the equation or the recipe.

But what I want to talk about is specifically how loneliness and coming out of this season can impact us and stifle us.

Because it's my contention that loneliness is in all reality, if we were to boil it down and move away from maybe what Websters would define loneliness as, what I'm calling it today is I think it's just pure bondage.

Right?

It's a place where the enemy will hold us in bondage, and we're going to be captive there until we're able to embrace some truths and not just come and acknowledge them every Sunday, and we're like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

Oh, you're right, I'm not alone.

God, okay, I got this.

And then by Wednesday, we're back writing the same thing.

And it's a little mini New Year's resolution every Sunday, right?

We're talking about some healthy habits, some healthy patterns.

What are we going to change about ourselves in 2020 to make a defining resolution difference to where we can start seeing some kingdom impact in our own lives so that we can experience the freedom that God has for us?

Survival stats, this is kind of interesting.

Um was getting in there and kind of looking up things.

I like to be out in the woods, which is interesting, and I'll unpack this in a minute for me because the woods growing up was kind of a it was a good and bad scenario for me.

Um and I'll tell you what I mean in a minute.

But uh, social factors on mortality.

This is what it says about survival stats, and as it relates to loneliness.

People who live isolated and lonely have a higher mortality rate by 26%.

If you were living lonely, and I don't mean alone, okay, I mean lonely, because here's the deal.

As a parent of four young kids and now a dog, sometimes alone feels really good, man, you know, and it's like, and the wife too, she's like, ah man, can you take them all out?

And yes, I get it.

We're tracking the same thing, and so yes, being alone is a good thing, can be a really good thing, but being lonely never is.

Dr.

Ed Cole quoted that.

Um, and I and I think there's profoundness in that statement because when we are alone with God, he's able to work and move through us and work in our hearts.

So the mortality rate, though, is that if you are in a constant state of loneliness where you feel isolated, you're isolated from physical connections, uh, social connections, emotional connections with people, you are 26% more likely to die sooner than those that have those connection points.

Let me stop right there.

Because in our current society, we would say, I have relationships, I'm connected.

I live at home, I have a cat, we have a relationship, but I'm connected because I have 3,000 likes on my Facebook page, or I'm Instagram, this and that.

See, as a culture, as a society, we've never been more connected.

But the sad reality is that we've never been more alone.

This isn't new.

We've talked about this, the stats that are coming out on the way people are connecting versus not connecting, the face-to-face, what we're losing in our marketplace, as it were, with human contact versus connecting and texting social media, right?

It's creating this bubble of loneliness to where we kind of walk around.

And I like to think about, because I have young kids, I see all the kid movies.

So some of you may have seen the movie Wally, futuristic movie, great movie, little robot guys, cute, right?

But in the movie, the human race has degenerated.

They live on this big spaceship and they just travel next to each other in their little hover pod and they just get their screen time and they're constantly fed, and they don't do anything.

There's no physical activity, and they're having a conversation, they're having community, right, with the person right next to them.

They're hovering next to each other and they're looking at their screen versus stopping and turning and talking to the person.

I don't know when that movie came out, five or six years ago, maybe, but it was it it hit the nail on the head.

It pinpointed that so well about where our culture, even though this was in the future, where we were headed.

People stranded alone in the wilderness.

So this is interesting.

There you have an infinitely higher survival rate if you are stranded with somebody versus being alone.

So if you go for a hike by yourself, you get stranded, and you know what you're doing, yes, you can get out.

But you have an infinitely higher stat of getting out if you have a friend, right?

Two minds better than one, etc.

You ever notice that when people stay alone or they get isolated, they get weird.

Right?

They get kind of strange.

They lose their ability, their social interaction.

We all know that I listen, let's just take a poll real quick.

Who here knows what I'm talking about, either has a friend or a family member who is that person who stays alone and is weird?

Okay, I'm raising my hand.

I could raise two hands.

Okay, I got a few.

Um when I was a trust officer in the bank world, uh, one of my beneficiaries had a lifetime trust in a condominium here in town.

She had a daughter.

She was the beneficiary of a lady who actually developed a lot of the north end.

And if I said the name, you guys would know it because uh there's some staples, there's a Catholic church she donated land to.

Um very famous restaurant now, bar and grill, over there.

But she donated her to her sister a lifetime inheritance of this condo.

So, what that means is that when she died, the condo would go back to the trust and the estate, and then we would sell it and parse it out to the then living beneficiaries.

This lady was a recluse.

She was just inward.

She wouldn't take calls as a trust officer.

I was supposed to ring, check in with her.

She wouldn't take my calls, she would never meet with me.

And the daughter who she would talk to sometimes, but mostly by letter, um, stopped hearing from her.

Mail started to pile up, and then some of the utility bills stopped getting paid.

And then there was a foul odor that the neighbors noticed.

This is a true story, okay?

I'm not making this up.

And so they called me out.

I called the police, we went in, and it was a couple weeks had passed.

And she had died alone in her house weeks before anybody had noticed or found her.

We got into her house, and her habits that she had formulated, she was so within herself.

This is a travesty.

What turned out happening was she had fell, she had hit her tooth, she had got an infection, she didn't get help, and the infection got into her bloodstream and caused her to have a cardiac arrest.

She died alone upstairs.

I will spare you the grim details of what that encounter was like.

But I will tell you that when upon opening her fridge, she had mason jars lined up meticulously in line with these clear fluids, different fluids.

They were, I don't know if she drank them, I don't know if they were broths or what.

And then all of her windows she had created tapestries for.

She was a seamstress.

That's what she did.

She did a lot of sewing, and she had blocked out any light from the outside world.

No light was coming in this place.

She was alone, she was isolated.

Very strange lady, right?

Wasn't meant to do that.

We weren't meant to be in that space.

God saw instantly in Adam, this guy's gonna need a friend, or he's gonna hold up in a tree, create tapestries, and start making jars with fluid in them.

So I'm gonna make him a woman so he's got some companionship.

He needs some help in this world, and he's gotta he need a woman to help tidy up the place a bit, right?

Not that that's your job, ladies.

Okay, don't mishear me on that.

You serve a far greater purpose than tidying things up.

I got into that little trouble last time.

Um God made Adam an equal companion in the garden.

And I think Eve probably gave Adam some of the names for saying he was probably gonna call a tiger something dumb.

And she's like, No, that's a tiger.

He's like, that's a great idea, let's call it a tiger.

Yeah, it's a good call.

So, interestingly, in my um, in my studies, real quick, there's a blog from survivalist, self-titled survivalist, Danny uh Dover.

I don't follow Danny.

I don't really know him.

Actually, I don't know him at all.

I never read his blog.

I wasn't really all that interested in him initially, but he had formulated, and he's a guy about what I would say maybe early millennial or late Gen Xer, somewhere there resonates, doesn't really have a home, kind of like me.

I don't have a tribe.

Um I'm a late Gen Xer, early millennial, whatever you want to say.

But the point is that he made this blog about his life list.

So instead of going with the bucket list, he chose a life list.

And in his life list, one of the things that he wanted to accomplish was spend 30 days completely alone and isolated in the wilderness with some few provisions.

He wanted to go out, survive in the wilderness, in the wild, and see what he could do.

He was telling his friends they were concerned for him, but equally fascinated at the same time.

And what's interesting is that this was the culminating experience of his life list that he wanted to do.

This was kind of the thing, the kind of the icing on the cake, as it were, of his uh his dreams, his goals, etc.

And so he's going to outline, and I got this captured here, with great clarity.

He captures in his mind the most difficult situation or the most difficult problem that he faced.

The article was rather fascinating because he starts to unpack what the mind does when it gets faced with kind of uh isolation.

See, our train, our brain is trained to decode words and sounds audibly.

So when we hear a sound, our brain audibly goes, okay, is that words?

Is that a language that I know?

Um, okay, if it's a language that I know, what are they saying?

And this is all happening very fast, right?

Well, when you stop hearing humans talk after a certain amount of time, you start hearing other noises.

And so Danny captures that at the point in his journey, halfway in, he starts hearing nature sounds, sounds in the forest, and his brain, he starts to think that he's hearing human voices.

But it's not the case.

His mind, his physical being is wanting that connection.

It's wanting that connection with human beings, and he doesn't have it, right?

And so, besides hearing voices, some hallucinations, some tangible issues, um, he describes great clearly the toughest part of his journey, and this is it.

He titles it loneliness, the importance of other people.

By far the hardest part of the experience was the depth and duration of my loneliness.

I felt a terrible despair that really rocked me to my core.

I thought of people constantly and had enough time to think about each year of my life thus far and the people who had affected me during that time.

I normally spend a lot of time alone and enjoy doing so.

However, I realized during this goal, though, that while I had experienced homesickness before, I had never really experienced loneliness.

It cut deep and was extremely difficult to deal with.

So I've never spent 30 days in the wilderness by myself.

As a young man, I'd go out and camp, and sometimes I'd camp by myself and I'd have alone time, and it was refreshing.

But I never stayed to the point where things got weird.

I never stayed to the point of extreme loneliness and homesickness.

But when we move away from his plan long enough, God's design and plan for us, things do indeed get weird.

My greatest fear growing up was when I was a young man, uh, young boy, I was like eight years old, and I was and I was in the woods and we were motorcycling, we were dirt biking, traveling around, and I was with my dad, and we were with some other friends, and we would go out, we'd dirt bike through the woods, we lived out like in the farmlands and then dense forests and woods and whatnot.

And we got stranded, his bike broke down, and the rest of the guys had left.

And all of a sudden it was just he and I, and we couldn't get the bike fixed, and we were pretty far from the car, from supplies, and I got really scared.

My dad was focused on the bike, um, he was trying to work it out, and I remember being overcome and terrified with fear in a way that I had never experienced it before.

I was terrified that we wouldn't survive, we wouldn't get out, we wouldn't be found, and it and it caused me panic and it and it and it froze me.

I froze, and then I started sobbing.

I was weeping on the side because we were there.

I mean, for me, it felt like an eternity.

Maybe we were there a half hour, 45 minutes, but I didn't know.

And my dad, like I said, he was just laser focused on the bike, trying to get the motorcycle up and running.

And um then he did notice me.

He looked up and and he noticed me, he reassured me, and he said, Hey, just pause for a minute.

Just let's just stop and let's just listen to the forest.

And we paused.

And in the distance, I heard the the motorcycles, the other dirt bikes, or the people we were with, and I heard them going around, and they were and they were and they were starting to circle back and come closer.

And I felt my spirit rise, I felt my spirit lift as I knew that I wasn't alone and that help was on its way.

If we couldn't get the bike fixed, we were gonna have company, we were gonna have resources, and things were coming back to us.

And instantly I felt better.

Instant, interestingly enough.

That was at age eight.

So two years ago, now I had a I got to experience a familiar feeling from that time in life.

We go up and we hunt in the upper flat tops uh for elk and um Roosevelt Elk Camp.

We were up there.

And uh two years ago, and then always the day before this the hunt opens, we go on our scouts, look for track, taste the elk poo, chew on it, is it fresh?

You know, good.

All right, where are they moving?

Good.

Some people do that up there, I've heard.

I've not witnessed it myself.

Um so we're up there, and I and and so we're scouting, and we go out in different different groups, and we go out and we're in a different angle.

And I was with a couple guys, and through the journey that we go, you go up and then you go through dark timber, and then it opens up into these valleys and open areas, and you go through dark timber.

And I mean like dark timber.

I don't know if any of you have ever been in like kind of timber like that.

I'm sure some of you have if you're hunters and wilderness guys.

Dark timber, ominous, it's creepy because it's amazing how much light they call it dark timber for a reason.

And there's this particular path, and I was following these guys, but I had stopped following them for a minute and um was collecting my thoughts, and then I looked up and they were out of sight.

And so then I started following them.

I couldn't hear them, some time had passed, and then I found myself, albeit kind of lost.

I was disoriented, I came out of some dark timber, and I didn't know exactly where I was.

And normally I take a pack with me, water, provisions, knife, whatever, you know, just like a just in case kind of thing.

Well, of course, this would be the one time where I don't have the jacket, I don't have the pack, I don't have any supplies.

I'm out there in t-shirt, I got a little crappy 20-ounce water bottle that's you know got a couple ounces left, and I start kind of looking around, and instantly I start to panic.

I'm like, okay, wait a minute.

All right, remember your training, you know.

And so, no.

But I did.

So your mind starts to go super fast, but then you know, like, okay, that's gonna solve you no use, and if you're not careful, you start kind of going quick and walking around and you're burning energy, and your mind starts to just kind of spin out.

So I said, okay, I'm gonna walk towards daylight, I'm gonna sit down, and so I went, gathered myself, said a prayer, said, Okay, Father, I know you're here with me.

Spirit, I know you're with me.

I'm not prepared to spend the night in the woods, like it's gonna get down below 30 in my shirt and t-shirt.

I don't have a way to sustain myself.

This is gonna get ugly fast.

We're getting close to dusk, and I'm almost out of water, and I think a squirrel just stole my last power bar.

And so I'm out of provisions, right?

I mean, we're running towards the end of this thing.

And so I get this calmness come on me.

I feel the presence of his spirit fall on me, and all of a sudden it's like crystal clear.

Like it just everything lines up.

I'm like, wait a minute, I know where I am.

There's a sun, make a sundial, shadows this way.

I'm kidding, I didn't make a sundial.

Um, but I did know because what we do is we store our pack for the next day's hunt up in this kind of tree line, and I knew where my pack was.

I knew that it had cold weather gear, I knew it had supplies, I knew it had everything that I would need, and I knew that if I did spend the night in the woods, and I know my brothers probably wouldn't let me do that, being as most of them are cadre and bloodstained allies and whatnot, uh, that would make for a pretty bad testimony that they let one of their BSAs die in the woods overnight.

So I figured that in any chance they probably might come looking for me.

There was hope for that.

But if I got back to my pack and I was pretty sure I had I knew how to get back there, then I knew an alternate way home.

So I knew that if I could at least do that, I would be salvaged.

I got back to my pack, got water, and then I saw the visual sight line and was able to find my way down.

And as I'm coming down and I'm on the descent down, sure enough, faithful brothers that they were, they were on their way back up the hill hollering for me.

And they're like, What'd you do, man?

You get lost, make us come look for you.

I'm like, yeah, all right.

And so I mean, I'm walking back kind of like a little bit at first, but I didn't get lost.

I just spent some time in the woods.

You know, I didn't want to admit the shame of getting lost, so I'm like, I wasn't lost, man.

I was just tired of hanging out with you guys.

So, and I was like, Yeah, okay, I got lost.

So the most important relationship in our lives has to be with the Father.

That relationship, everything from that flows.

Because he's always there.

At the end of Matthew 28, 20, kind of my core verse for this message, and I would call this 20 B.

So, right before he's just given the great commission, go out, minister to the nations, make disciples of them.

But then on the heels of that, and lo, I am with you always, even until the end of the age.

The Gospel of Matthew, this is the last audible recording of Jesus to his disciples.

It's his very last words.

And they say that a person's last words before they die are probably their most important, the most profound, the most concentrated, the most distilled.

What they choose to impart and pass on to those remaining are crucial.

If you were to take stock right now of what you've learned in this life, what you know to be true, what you know to be foundational, you're on your deathbed.

What do you know in those moments?

What would you pass on to those around you before you died?

What parting thoughts about life, your great takeaways, your loved ones by your side?

What would you share with them?

Jesus' last words to his disciples are reassurance of his promise.

You're not alone.

I will always be with you, even till the very end of the age.

I'm leaving my spirit with you that never leaves you.

Sometimes we distance ourselves from the spirit, right?

We don't feel close to God, but that's more on us than it is on him.

He's always right there.

If we are in Christ, he is always with us.

It's up to us to get how tangibly close we want to experience the Father in His presence.

I'm going to read you the amplified version of the same passage.

It goes a little bit deeper, it goes a little bit extra in this case.

And lo, I am with you always, remaining with you perpetually, regardless of circumstance and on every occasion, even to the end of the age.

If Christ is in us, we're never alone.

If you feel lonely, it's a trap.

If you are in Christ and you feel lonely, that is a trap and a lie of the enemy, because he's trying to pull you away from the flock.

He's trying to isolate you so that he can get to his ultimate purpose to destroy you, take you down, and achieve his goals.

Romans 8, 38-39 in the New Living Translation.

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God's love.

Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor worries about tomorrow, not even the powers of hell can separate us from God's love.

No power in the sky above or in the earth below.

Indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing, nothing in all creation can separate us from God's love.

This is the Passion Translation of the same scripture, and I love this.

So now I live with the confidence, being strong and courageous, that there is nothing in the universe with the power to separate us from God's love.

I am convinced that his love will triumph over death, life's troubles, fallen angels, or dark rulers in the heavens.

There is nothing in our present or future circumstances that can weaken his love for us.

There is no power above us or beneath us, no power that could ever be found in the universe that can distance us from God's passionate love, which is lavished upon us through our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One.

We hear this a lot.

If you come to church regularly, you hear this message a lot to some degree or another.

God's there, He's faithful, He loves us, He wants us.

But then we have blockers that we place on ourselves that hold us back.

We have bondage that we walk in that we never really relinquish.

God, I'll give you 99%.

But the 1%, I can't let that out.

I can't let that out because there's too much shame around it, there's too much fear around it.

If that 1% got out, I would be isolated.

Nobody's gonna want to be around me.

My sin is too great.

And so you keep it.

You keep it, and what that does is that gives the devil, that gives the enemy the one thing he needs to just kind of keep you from really experiencing the breakthrough, the freedom.

Really, that's what this is, right?

It's the freedom that God wants for us that we limited ourselves.

Had a great year.

I mean, there were tough times, there were challenging parts of my year.

Got to take a trip with my beautiful wife.

We went to Italy this summer.

It was a lifeless.

I don't like Bucket anymore.

I'm using this guy's term, lifelist.

It seems more vibrant.

Um, lifelist opportunity.

Two weeks over there.

The best time I've ever had in my life.

And it was with her.

We had a great time experiencing, in my opinion, some of the best things that that country had to offer, and I highly recommend going if you ever get the chance.

It's a great country.

But then on the heels of that great experience, we would enter into a tough season in our lives.

I would enter into one of the more the most difficult places I've ever been.

Because God started working on me.

He started poking at me.

He poked at me before, but I couldn't dodge.

Eh.

No, not no, not yet.

Not ready.

I don't want that.

I'm going to hold on to that.

Okay, I'm not ready to give that one up, God.

Well, I think that we have opportunities in our lives where God comes for all of us.

Where God comes for all of us, and we have an opportunity to give him the thing that we're holding on to, that he wants to take and give us the freedom that he has for us so that we can be living from a place in our lives that he has designed for us.

And in that place, I relented with fear.

I understood the passage in a deeper way where Jacob wrestled with the angel.

I wrestled with God for a whole night.

And I would walk into on the sunrise one of the hardest days of my life.

And I look back and I think about that and I'm so thankful for God.

I'm thankful that he came after me that way.

Because he wanted something from me that he saw me carry.

He's like, that's not what I intended for you, son.

I love you.

I have so much more for you, but you've got to get rid of that.

You gotta let it go.

You gotta let it go so that you can start living from the place that I designed you to be.

I created you for this.

I grew up in church, man.

We were there three days a week.

And I heard this, but in my mind, it was stuck here.

It never got here.

And it was always, you could only, if my heart had like nine layers, I would only let God get to layer eight.

But he came after me, he got me, he broke me down, and I got it.

He got into layer nine, he got into that last layer.

And I gotta be honest, once that happened, church, I haven't stopped like, like there's songs that come on that resonated with this dark season or the season of it was a it was a short dark season because on the heels of that became restoration, became freedom, and the freedom of which I never knew was possible.

The freedom of which I didn't know existed, I mean in theory, but I didn't know it existed for me.

Right?

No amens out there?

Is anybody relating to this?

It's fine.

I'm talking to the guy in the mirror because I mean I do get it.

Um and and I will say that the freedom that has come from that, my heart is been tenderized.

You know how sometimes you get the meat that's on sale and you take it home and you make it good and you like hit it with a hammer until it's like that's like prime filet, you know, the hard rump roast, but you can tenderize it good.

That was my heart.

Okay, it was this hard, crappy piece of meat, and the guy just tenderized it to a delicious tenderloin kind of thing.

And and so now when songs come on or I experience his tangible presence when I get into this focused time for me that I spend time with him and I carve out because it's constant.

It has to be, it's the lifeline because I gotta hear his voice.

I gotta have him hear him tell me in the morning, I love you.

Well done.

I'm proud of what you did.

Let's go get it today together.

Songs will come on, worship songs, and I and I get instantly emotional.

Like I cry all the time.

My wife will tell you, she's like, something will come on, we'll start talking, and I just start crying.

I'm like, what is this?

I'm not seven, but I'm crying like I'm seven, and I don't care.

There's freedom.

There's freedom, and there's things that all of us sitting here today that held us back because we hold on to it.

And we're not ready to let it go.

But if we're faithful and we meet with him, he'll meet with us because he wants to.

Jesus' gift from the cross was his Holy Spirit, and his Holy Spirit came and he swallowed up loneliness for all time, for all humanity, for those who want to live in Christ Jesus.

We don't have to be lonely and isolated in bondage.

I mean, we can be relational on the surface as long as nobody knows that one thing about me.

That's just the enemy's tool.

That's his garden.

You gave him rich soil to play in and plant his crops.

You need to till that junk.

You need to get rid of it.

God's promises are constant.

Joshua 1 9, my commandment, be strong, courageous, do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

Deuteronomy 31.8.

And the Lord, he is the one who goes before you.

He will never leave you nor forsake you.

Do not fear, be dismayed.

Hebrews 30, 13, 5, the second half of that verse, for God has said, I will never leave, never fail you, I will never abandon you.

The words never and always are bad words in our house.

You cannot use those words, never always.

It's like profanity, right?

Because I have four kids that are always arguing their point about she never did this, he doesn't do that, she always does this.

Sorry, can't use those words.

Because that's not true.

We don't always do that, and we never not do this.

The only person in our house that can use those words is God.

Because what does he say?

I will never leave you.

I am always with you, even to the end of the age.

So why is Matthew 2820 so profound if we were to cross-reference this experience, these words with Jesus, last words on the cross before he died, which we often recite at Easter, right?

We hear these often.

Uh, we're talking as we enter the Easter season, Mark 15, 34.

The comparable verse would be in Matthew 27, 46.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Aloy, alloy, lama, sabatchithani, which translates, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Question mark.

This hit me when I was going through this concept of being never alone and realizing that God's always been there with me.

I mean, I had to really understand this.

Maybe this is like this was like revelationary for me to understand it to the profound degree that I get it today.

Jesus, for the first time in all of time, separated himself from the Trinity.

He was alone, he was apart from his Father at the most painful, darkest hour of his time and day on this earth.

Right before he goes and commits his spirit to heaven, he cries out.

Right?

And we compare and contrast that is because Jesus, through his whole ministry, I only do what I see the Father doing.

I only say what I hear the Father saying.

He has such a connection with his father that in that moment of pain and time where he is alone and he needs him the most, he doesn't feel his presence.

He's not there.

Jesus understands loneliness as good or better than all of us.

None of us have had a connection to the degree that he had with the Father at that point.

So to have that relationship not there when he needed it the most, I think that's why he gives those words to the disciple.

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

We need to hear that.

We need to sink that in.

That has to be the foundation for the sustaining of the Christian life.

His final words, comfort and secure to the disciples.

I know what it felt like to be forsaken, to be alone, and for that reason, because I love you so much, I will always be with you.

You will never be alone in the battle.

I experienced this.

I took this on the cross, so you don't have to.

Verse 5.

Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy.

No shadow of shame will darken their faces.

If we just took that into 2020, Church, 2020 would look so different for all of us than 2019 did.

Verse 6: In my desperation I prayed and the Lord listened.

He saved me from all my troubles.

For the angel of the Lord is a guard.

He surrounds and defends all who fear him.

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him.

To truly understand that, to take refuge in him.

See, David wrote this psalm at perhaps the lowest point in his life.

He was alone on the run from King Saul.

He had just left his best friend, his maybe greatest resource and ally in the world, Jonathan.

He was being chased by paid assassins.

And he had to run and hide in the cave of Agilem.

Yet the beautiful sounds of praise were heard echoing in his cavern as he worshipped.

This is a lesson for all of us, right?

We praise our way out of our difficulties into his light.

In the early part of my journey, I would step out, I'd go on my walk, and I was doubtful that I would encounter the Holy Spirit.

Prayer walking in his word, praying, worshiping, had my headphones on, listening to meditations and encouraging words, and just getting with the Father, begging the Father, inviting the Holy Spirit to come and spend time with me.

And then on my return trip, constantly, warmness would flow over me, and I would just be overwhelmed with the presence of the Holy Spirit, and I was undone.

I didn't have back at home and I was just a mess.

I was crying and blubbering, you know.

I mean, I it was so tangible.

It is so tangible, even to this day.

Woke up this morning.

I've been doing that a lot, actually, waking up earlier and earlier every day because of the doggy thing.

We buy the dog for the kids, but then you know how that goes.

I get the early morning shift.

6 30, 5 30, 4 30.

We're out there, frozen tundra, walking around.

And so I'm like, Lord, this thing would make an awesome pair of slippers.

Just let me see it through through puberty.

Oh man.

So I actually threw that out there as a name, but we chose Vera.

Um, slippers did not stick.

So, and I know I'm running, I'm running a little long here, guys, so I'll start to lay on the plane.

But I just want to say that now, five months into the journey, his presence is as tangible as it ever was because I was willing to lay the side the one thing that I didn't want to, that I wanted to hold on to forever, that I thought I could take to my grave.

He said, I don't want you to take that to your grave.

I want you to give it to me because I want you to walk in a newness, in a new place, from a new heart.

Paul says, we get a new heart in that transaction.

And I can say that that's a fact for me.

I feel like I got a new heart on the operating table with the great surgeon.

We were created for three purposes.

And I didn't have like uh PowerPoint today, but this is all in the notes on the app if you guys are following me there.

Created for three purposes.

We were created to seek him.

Isaiah 55, 5 through 6.

Seek the Lord while he may be found.

Call on him while he is near.

We talked about the Magi hearing from the angels.

They traveled thousands of miles and over many weeks to see the king.

They sought him.

Second thing is, we're not only to seek him, we were created to find him.

Jeremiah 29, 13.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.

We have to use everything in us to go after him.

And then he's so faithful.

He meets us every time.

Thirdly, we were created to worship him.

Worships mentioned in the Bible and some translation, varying 8,600 times in Scripture.

It's a crucial connection to God.

It's primary for him.

It has to be primary for us.

It's one of the three reasons that we he created us.

You can deny these facts.

You can say, Yeah, maybe that's for other people, not for me.

No.

He made humanity because he wanted relationship.

He wanted to be sought after.

Then he wanted to show himself.

He wanted to be found by us.

And then he wanted to be worshipped.

And it's a different posture because when we relent and we worship, then we get something in the transaction that is far greater than anything we can imagine.

Psalm 22, 26.

All who seek the Lord will praise him, their hearts will rejoice with everlasting joy.

Psalm 43, 4.

There I will go to the altar of God, to God the source of all my joy.

I will praise you with my harp.

Oh my God.

Oh God, oh my God.

Five ways to experience His presence in 2020.

Think of this as you meet with people in your life daily.

You have daily relationships.

You have to manage those relationships.

They take cultivation, they take maintenance.

We're gonna have a couples retreat.

We're gonna talk about how you maintenance those relationships that you're closest to.

That's exciting.

But if you think about how you meet with the most important relationship daily, and let me just say for some of us, this isn't an anorexic thing where on the best case scenario, you're here every Sunday and you're getting to eat with him once a week.

All of us eat more than once a week.

Right?

Yes.

So why do we sometimes only meet with our best friend or our most important relationship once a week?

The opportunity is this.

If you if you frame it, and I think like hosting my best friend, and this is having good company, the company you want to visit, not the cousin Eddie who shows up on your doorstore uh with the fifth wheel parked, the RV parked in your uh in your driveway, and he's there for a month.

That's not the relationship or the or the company I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about you want this.

You're looking forward to it, you're excited.

You would prepare for that friend.

You would prepare a space for them, you would find a spot to visit with them with limited interruptions.

None if possible, because you're excited.

You want to tell them about your life, you want to hear about their life, you're looking forward to this exchange.

Preparation, number one.

Number two is invitation.

You have to send the invite.

Okay?

In prayer, ask him to come, visit with you.

Ask for the spirit to stretch for him.

Real quick, in Italy, we go to the Sistine Chapel.

You guys are familiar with Michelangelo, probably up there in his top five famous pieces.

Yes?

What I love about this particular thing is he captures our human heart in its pure fleshly things so well.

Look at the posture of man.

This is generally how we pursue God.

We're laid back, our fingers bent, and we're just kind of half-heartedly reaching out for him.

Jeremiah says we've got to find him with our whole heart.

Look at God.

He's got cherubs holding him back into heaven so he doesn't fall to the ground.

And he's stretching and he's reaching out and he's extending his finger as far as it can go.

My challenge to you, church, is that we change our posture from one that of casualness to intensity and desire, and we reach and we stretch for him.

We meet him back with the same intensity that he's reaching for us.

Invitation.

See, God invites us first.

He prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies in Psalm 23, right?

We're simply asking him to return, come and meet with us again.

Align your heart's posture and position, move closer to his.

Anticipation.

Thirdly, anticipation.

Wait with divine expectancy for him to show up.

Be a good listener, is what I think this means for me.

Don't be the friend who does all the talking.

Right?

We have those friends.

Generally, those kinds of friends aren't in the immediate circle of friends.

So, like God has things he wants to share with you, he wants to tell you.

So don't be the friend who does all the talking.

Be silent.

If you've prepared a space for him, if you've invited him, if you've set the table, as it were, and then you're anticipating his arrival, church, he will show up.

He wants to share with you how he feels about you, his love for you.

And you can't miss the most important part of his visit.

Because that's it.

And when he does that for me, it's always what I need to hear in that moment for that time and place.

He knows my heart better than I do.

And he gave me a new one, so I need to be asking him and checking him in, checking in with him, what do you have for my heart today?

Don't start with I love you.

Okay.

I mean, yeah, we pass those words easily, but if I really want that to sink in and settle in, some of us have been hurt, abandoned by people who love us the most or should have loved us the most, and we carry around those scars and that pain and that hurt.

But we don't know what to do with that until we hear the Father's voice of I love you.

Fourthly, exaltation.

We're to praise him.

We're to worship in the throne room when his spirit falls on us.

I'm overcome with a strong desire to worship him when his spirit shows up.

I can't help myself.

All I want to do is go to my favorite playlist, my favorite set list, and start just interacting with him because I'm overcome by the spirit.

Fifthly, it was repetition, but it didn't have the same sound.

You know what I mean?

We had to end with a duration.

Asian.

Duration, there's a frequency and length are crucial to this process.

See, you experience other relationships daily.

You need to experience this most important one daily the same way.

Depending on the season you're in, you might need more time with Jesus.

Maybe it's two or three hours a day.

Maybe you guys, maybe this is more of a maintenance because you're walking good, you're feeling good, you're hearing from the Father daily.

Maybe some of you already living in that space, so it's a daily checkup and maybe 30 minutes get you there.

See, I think that your season or your situation defines your duration.

Because when you start plugging in and you start getting the uh you start getting operated on, you start getting the medication, you start getting the father's medication versus self medication.

Hello.

Any of us know anything about self medication?

When you start getting the Father's medication for your heart, and you start experiencing that time with him, you'll crave it, and you're gonna want more of it.

Some of us sitting here today feeling far from God, and the thought of his of this exercise may be foreign, not available to us.

Meeting with him on an intimate level, on the most intimate level, holding on, giving him that last piece that we're holding on to.

Scary.

There's fear there.

Fear's a lie, it's a trap.

And I think today, at the end of 2019, you get an opportunity.

There's an invitation to lay that one thing or that thing that's just holding you back in the river of grace that flows from his blood from the cross of Calvary today.

He wants to cover that, he wants to take it.

The Father's calling you home today, and will you answer?

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